Joel Anderson reports: The e-mails referred to one of the highest-ranking officers at the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office as “racist.” They alleged discriminatory treatment against some of the deputies. They were supposedly coming from Sgt. George Smith. However, the e-mails were all the work of an online thief, according to the Sheriff’s Office. Former Deputy…
Author: Dissent
HHS offers health IT privacy guidelines
Brian Robinson reports in Government Health IT: The Health and Human Services Department has begun overhauling the privacy and security rules that govern personal health information, which is considered vital to attempts by Congress and the Obama administration to broaden the adoption of electronic health records. HHS published guidance on April 17 that outlines the…
Americans' medical files go digital, by way of Asia
Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times has an article on how medical transcription services are outsourced. Jeff Drummond of HIPAA Blog doesn’t have a problem with that and doesn’t see much risk if the info is mainly medical and not financial. I would bet that for many people, the risk of their sensitive medical…
Proposed breach notification rule would affect more health vendors
Bob Brewin reports: Rules proposed by the Federal Trade Commission on April 16 on disclosure of breaches of personal health information would greatly expand the number of companies that would be subject to notifying individuals if their personal health data was exposed because records were lost or stolen, or because a hacker broke into a…
HHS Releases Guidance for Securing Health Information and Preventing Harm From Breaches
nbsp; Barbara Kram reports: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has published guidance regarding technologies and methodologies to secure health information and prevent harm by rendering health information unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act required publication of the guidance by April 18. This builds on…
Wal-Mart employee data compromised; 48,000 affected
Well, I haven’t found anything more on this from any news source and it’s always odd to find out about a U.S. breach from a non-U.S. source, but International Supermarkets is reporting that: It has come to light that Wal-Mart has suffered a breach in its staff data system due to a former employee leaving…